4 Things You Need to Know About Alien: Covenant

We visited the set and learned some vital information.

By
Lucy O'Brien

“Alien was a posh horror film,” says Ridley Scott. “I never think about it as a horror film, it just scared the sh*t out of people. It had too much class, to be conceited about it, to be classified as horror. Nothing wrong with horror but I think of horror as… well I better not get into that too much.”

We’d momentarily caught Scott by a stroke of luck as he prepared to shoot a scene inside a cavernous ceremonial hall, framed by enormous concrete heads of ancient gods, their aquiline features evocative of Prometheus’ Engineers. ‘The Hall of Heads’ was an interesting spot to chat to Scott, as it was a very Prometheus-like set - with all the enormity and gravitas that evokes in your imagination - within a very Alien-like movie.

Like Xenomorphs, the white, humanistic Neomorphs don’t arrive on the scene fully formed. They infiltrate their host bodies through airborne spores before ripping their way out, bloodily and violently through mouths and spines, as translucent infants. “We have a little guy who’s a little baby - a little puppet - and he grows incredibly quickly so we have a few versions, stages, five I think,” says O'Sullivan.

Considering the demands of movement, these puppets can’t all be physically in the film. Covenant will be a blend of practical and digital, and many of the practical creations we see in the workshop are proof-of-concept models rather than active participants; which still makes for a more realistic end product. “We find it all the time when we’re designing things on a computer screen, it’s very dangerous,” says O’Sullivan. “It’s too easy to look at it and go ‘yeah that’s great’ and send it off - and then when you see it on the big screen it doesn't look quite as good. We attempt to make things in a practical way and we’re honing in on the design through that process of making the film. That’s what Ridley needs and that’s what the film needs.”

4) It's not Prometheus 2

Our visit ends with a cluster of press photographs on Covenant’s largest set, an enormous shell that serves as the interior of a crashed dreadnaught. At the centre of it sits the Space Jockey’s chair, also the centre of Alien’s entire mythology, and a reminder that Scott is still pushing the ball he got rolling with Prometheus; the reason behind it all. “I thought with that special kind of creature, it shouldn’t really have run its course, it shouldn’t have ended,” says Scott. “So you come back with a really simple idea, which is who made it and why? Nobody asked that question.”

But we are told time and time again that Covenant is leading toward the events of Alien, and shares more of its DNA with that film than it does with Scott’s dizzying (for better and worse) epic. “[Scott] did listen to the criticism, if you like, of Prometheus” says Corbould. “People wanted more ‘Aliens’.”

“If you're making it for a PG 13 or 15 your hands are tied to give proper horrors, but when the gloves are off and it’s 18, R-rated, then you can make the movie exactly what you want, with more aliens. He listened to the audience that wanted more aliens. They're going to get a lot more aliens, more than they probably anticipated.”

For fans of of Scott’s original, these might be the words they need to hear to get excited for this universe once more.

Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.